In your face

People are still not comfortable with technology.
They keep on sending messages via everything possible and they read Facebook’s news feed BUT it’s nothing like seeing them in person.

When you see them in person, a whole lot of things unlock in their mind:
– they develop an opinion about you
– they develop feelings for you
– you are present in their short-term memory if you see them once or during a short amount of time
– you are present in their long term memory if you see them several times during several weeks or months and if they attach emotions to the image they have of you in their mind

By seeing a lot of people very often, it happened to me to get invited to many events.
And it wouldn’t have happened if I kept messaging these people without meeting them.

Why is this?
I think it’s because communication between humans depend on way more than just the content of your message.
It involves body language, intonation, behaviour, face expressions.
All that allows us to trust or not somebody else. To be present or not in the mind of somebody else.
It helps us relate to the other, to remember us that the other is just another human with his qualities and flaws.

We need to see if somebody is dangerous or not, it depends on the survival of our species. That’s how we survived so far.
When somebody is wearing a mask, a costume, something hiding his face, we can’t judge him fast enough.
So we don’t trust by default.
We don’t trust the unknown by default. We can unlearn this behaviour, by consciously noticing when we are doing it.

We judge people according to their appearance, behaviour, clothes because we need to categorize to go faster in our decisions, and also because it is less computing mentally.
If we see “Person A” wearing “Clothes A”, having a “Face A” and he represents a danger, the next person: Person B having similar “Clothes” to “Clothes A” and similar “Face” to “Face A”, we will deduce that he is as dangerous as Person A.
As easy as it is.

It’s a survival reflex but you can control it, you can choose to judge quickly or slowly people. You can learn and unlearn what you want.

Like always, the answer is: Balance. Not too much of something, not too few of it.